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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 4556874" data-attributes="member: 13966">Honestly, if you want this kind of reduced heroicness and increased realism, either stick with E6 or reduce the maximum ranks possible.  Make maximum rank 1 + 1/4th character level or something, for class skills, and half that for cross-class skills.But Conan or Hercules falling to their death, just because their massive strength and adventuring skills aren't enough to climb a small cliff to reach their enemy's stronghold, is dumb.  Even if you're going to discount skill as rather unimportant, you shouldn't discount raw ability.  An extremely intelligent and experienced wizard isn't going to fail to identify a Charm Person casting, nor is an extremely strong barbarian who hunts arboreal critters all the time going to fail climbing a tree.And how often do you think adult monkeys fall out of trees?  Because if you discount their racial bonuses to Climb checks for having a natural climb speed and such, they're going to fall down a lot, and a monkey only has single-digit HP, so that means falling to its death or near-death each time.  Likewise, how do you think salmon make it up-river, let alone up a waterfall or other incline, to lay their eggs each year?  If their Swim bonus is cut down, they're doomed.  Racial bonuses and whatnot really shouldn't be reduced.Don't make 10th-level characters chumps when it comes to skill checks.  These guys can slay young dragons on their own, shrug off a fireball, completely dodge a lightning bolt, walk away with just some scratching and bruising after being hit by a rhino, polymorph into dragons, ingest nightshade with little chance of harm, cut through an iron bar with a sword, make cities seem to disappear, or return the dead to life.Hercules should not lose his grip on a climb and fall just because he's only got one super-strong hand holding him up (a hand that could easily hold up a boulder).  Merlin shouldn't be clueless when another wizard casts a simple spell.  Smaug shouldn't get swept away in a small river's current just because he spent his life on the Lonely Mountain and other rocky areas, because he's so freaking massive and draconically strong that no piddly river is going to move him.  Legolas shouldn't misttep and fail his Move Silently check when sneaking through the woods to surprise an orcish mook.  Sure, if it's an Uruk-Hai commander or something they might be skilled enough and alert enough to stand a small chance of noticing him, but Grob the Green certainly won't.In other words, realism isn't for D&D past 6th-level or so.  Realism takes a back seat and shuts the eff up if he knows what's good for him, when wizards are destroying cities and human fighters are killing armed 60-foot giants with 3-foot pointy sticks.It's perfectly reasonable to expect some degree of realism, but not very much of it when the PCs have reached the equivalence of literary and mythological/legendary heroes.If you want to challenge Hercules with a physical task, make him climb a precariously-stacked 10-mile pillar of bones in Hades or something, not a boring 500-foot cliff in the Prime Material Plane.  He'll hustle up that cliff-face even with the penalties for an accelerated climb, but he'll have to be more careful trying to scale that huge, shaky pillar of bones.</blockquote>

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